What He Couldn't Bear

The bear had been watching him for thirty years.

Mounted in his father's study, glass eyes dull with accumulated dust, the grizzly stood frozen on hind legs, claws raised in perpetual attack. James had hated it as a child, had hidden beneath the desk whenever his mother sent him to fetch his father for dinner. The bear's mouth was forever open, teeth bared in a roar that never made a sound.

Now his father was dead, and James stood alone in the study, wearing the old fedora he'd found in the closet. The hat smelled of stale pipe tobacco and regret. It was too large for him, slipping down over his eyes whenever he moved his head.

"You never could fix anything, could you?" James whispered to the empty room.

His father's last words had been about this hat. "Don't let your mother throw it out," he'd rasped from the hospital bed, oxygen cannula tracing his jaw. "It's lucky."

Lucky. The man who'd gambled away his college fund, who'd shown up drunk to James's wedding, who'd made his mother cry every holiday for twenty years — he'd believed in luck.

A dog barked outside, breaking his reverie. Buster, his father's golden retriever, now James's responsibility. The dog had stopped eating three days ago, when the hospice nurses took the body away.

James adjusted the hat, trying to see himself through his father's eyes. What had the old man felt, standing here night after night, nursing whiskey and staring at a dead bear? Had he felt like a king? A conqueror? Or just a small man pretending to be something larger?

He remembered his mother's voice, thin and tired: "He loved you, James. He just didn't know how to show it."

Some things couldn't be forgiven. Some things could only be borne.

James took off the hat and set it on the desk, careful not to disturb the ring of condensation from his father's habitual tumbler. The bear watched, silent as ever.

Outside, Buster barked again — demanding, insistent, alive.

James turned toward the door. It was time to feed the dog.